Long shot

Pink said it all began with a meeting with the staff at OddLot Entertainment in Los Angeles, which owns the rights to Walter Isaacson's biography of Einstein.

He'd been moving back and forth between Los Angeles and Toronto making films and music videos after beginning his screenwriting career in a cramped apartment on Agricola Street in Halifax.

They ordered the series right in the room- Noah Pink

OddLot was hoping to turn the Einstein story into a feature film, so it asked Pink to read the book and write a screenplay.

Pink decided Einstein's life involved too many "momentus events" to fit into a two-hour timeframe, and that the story would be better suited to a television show format, with multiple episodes.

He also decided he had to find a way to convince the company that he "was the right guy to do it."

As a screenwriter from Nova Scotia, he said, "I knew it was going to be a long shot to get the job," so he went all out with his pitch, walking them through all 10 episodes.

"I remember very distinctly how that phone call ended, because it ended with radio silence," Pink said.

He wasn't expecting a call back. Then, surprisingly, he got one.

Noah Pink on the set for Genius, which was primarily filmed in Prague. (Noah Pink)

Enter Ron Howard

Pink said he was told Ron Howard, child star from The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, and Oscar-winning director of A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and The Da Vinci Code, among other films, liked the script and wanted to meet.

"That's incredible," Pink said. "This is the first director we went to and he wants to do it, that's fantastic."